Solving the SaaS, SOA and Legacy Applications Sudoku

A number of factors complicate the IT landscape:

• Legacy systems account for a high percentage of application functionality and data storage. An integration strategy that doesn’t account for key legacy data formats only solves a small piece of the integration puzzle.
• The myriad software systems throughout enterprises create a tangle of software asset management, version control, licensing and a host of other issues.
• Hard-wired application links are often created as needed to join enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain, accounting and other applications in a custom coded point-to-point style that is incredibly complex and fragile.
• The need for B2B connections to customers and suppliers dramatically expands the number of disparate and incompatible data and application formats.
• Companies are adopting the SaaS model for some applications, further complicating the types of endpoints that need to be included in an integration strategy.

Alongside this complicated variety of connectivity needs is the one constant in the corporate world: change. The imperatives of M&A activities that drive modern business have ensured that no single business system or IT stack will remain static for long. Each link in the integration chain can (and will) break on a periodic basis. Integration solutions that are unable to rapidly and economically adapt to this constant change are the single biggest cause of integration project failure.

The five-star Sudoku challenge is how to cost-effectively implement a process that can precisely match up with each of hundreds or even thousands of widely varied and volatile endpoints and flex with constant change without breaking.

The best strategy can be summed up in just a few key points. First, stay loose. Tightly coupled, frequently custom-coded connections in the traditional integration style mean that inevitable changes at one level require a corresponding level of change in the other layers. This rapidly increases the costs around integration and, over a period of time, dwarfs the initial license cost.

SOA offers a fresh approach and a more adaptive architecture for business integration that includes flexible technologies like Web services, asynchronous messaging, business process management (BPM) and the enterprise service bus (ESB). SOA services are self-contained, reusable, application-based units of work. They can include business functions, transactions or system service functions like show balance, check inventory, place order or receive shipment. A service requester or consumer, usually a business process, sends these requests. The service provider, any application, database, legacy system or functionality that has published its services conforming to industry standards, sends a response. In an SOA-based activity, the service request and response can be synchronous for tightly coupled, transactional needs or asynchronous so that business processes can continue independent of response. Whenever possible, go with a more robust and scalable message-passing architecture based on asynchronous, loosely coupled, coarse-grained principles. That way, if one aspect changes or fails, the rest of the system isn’t pulled down with it.

The next strategy key is an agile integration platform. Many SOA implementations today still use unwieldy and management-intensive custom code developed to solve the “last mile” integration problems. A single, unified integration middleware platform, preferably with an open metadata layer to support reusability and unify version control, gives flexibility and durability to integration connections and vastly reduces ongoing maintenance costs. Be careful of platforms that are really amalgamations of different integration applications acquired as small software companies were swallowed up by larger players. Their own internal parts can end up not integrating with each other well. Stick with a platform built on a single code base. An intuitive but not oversimplified visual design environment with a lot of power behind it is important, not just for rapid initial implementation, but for speed of repair and maintenance when the inevitable changes happen. Rapid design capability means rapid repair capability. With the sheer number of endpoints needed, the integration solution has to be executable on a variety of platforms and have a wide range of connectivity adapters, particularly to legacy data and applications. The ability to connect to SaaS applications is also essential in the modern world and is likely to become more so as time passes.

Next, solve one section of the puzzle at a time. Trying to wrap your brain around a whole page full of numbers can give anyone a headache, but solving each individual box, row or column in a Sudoku can make the goal of the whole puzzle solution attainable. Similarly, incremental adoption of any SOA integration solution, with your eye on the overall goal, can give immediate ROI while still working toward that bright, flexible integrated world. Many companies fall into the trap of huge, enterprise-wide integration projects that have an all-or-nothing “big bang” philosophy behind them. The company struggles along with the old cobbled-together, brittle solutions while the “big solution project” drags on and on, trying to hit a moving target. The business environment and IT infrastructure changes so rapidly that often by the time huge projects are finally complete, they’re obsolete.